Being of Two Minds

Our playing field is completely overgrown
now. I'm calling it a “playing field” though it was just a bare
hillside with rocks we plucked and threw into a sewer grate for
a game. But it was not “just,” as in “inconsequential”; I only mean
the field was in no way official. And I mean to be neither sentimental
nor nostalgic-though to say “our” field does mark it with an intimacy,
I realize. To present a little history here, even if remote and
sketchy, to let you know this site is charged and layered-up, is
important, so that I might best grade into the state I am bent on
exploring: being of two minds.

Passing our field, some milkweed fluff blew onto my black Tshirt
and I let it stay-it fastened at my breast, and Milk of me now
I thought, though I do not long to be breast-feeding, seven years after
I stopped. And then: Fuzzy-edged cloud, after burn, spun sugar halo . . .
The day was so beautiful that I laughed, the sky so absurdly blue,
June first, it seemed apologetic, a making-up-for. But the laughter
was not tinged with sadness of any kind, for the game we played was
of a certain time and place. It was meant to be contained, I know this
now, and looking back, the game itself was absurdly blue and lit, a
respite even, like this day, in which nothing, for once, came up about
this all going, me going, everything too soon gone. I crossed the street
and saw a parked truck covered in Astroturf with thousands of little
plastic animals hot-glued on at all angles. Then I really burst out, and
as I passed it, looked back and saw, hand-painted in white on the
bumper: “Laughter drives the winter from human faces ha ha ha.”

I was not of two minds at that moment. Instead, I laughed easily,
without thought or effort. Whereas two minds come in. They find
you. They wrestle and present cases, part waters and curtains. There
can be legalese with two minds, and wranglings, and shadows and
rays vying. But this was one mind-the freedom from sadness, from
missing the game; the bright weather, the truck with its tailgate
afterthought; and the day, or moment at least, unbesieged.

Then, closer to home, came a yellow rose in the yard of the
hands-down best gardener in the neighborhood, wet at the top of
the climbing bush, bent far from the lattice, heavy and shirred on its
stalk, but upright.

There is a way a flower can be frightening and this rose was
emphatically so. It was doing exactly what it was called to do at that
instant, the only moment there to receive it. Wholly in time, it was
fixed to its task, with all consequence still ahead. It did not refer
to Shakespeare's Sonnet 50, which earlier I had been reading: “For
that same groan doth put this in my mind: / My grief lies onward,
and my joy behind.” No. Centrally commanding as the rose was, as
a heart is, it was not a scooped center posed between griefs. It was
the yellowest butter/cream/custard and bowl of itself. And unto
itself, unhinged from time, I saw it. Not “timeless” in its beauty, but
loud. It was, I think, laughing. That yellow might have been a “peal.” There might have been “mirth" or “glee” in its face. The rose might
have grown “on a lark”-then flown! But not then. Not just then. It
was fat and its wings were folded. Nimble and fearsome in its flight
contained, its one aureate face/body/mind bent on neither staying
nor going.

~

Really, I think there are more than two minds.

But that third, bent on settling up: that’s not the state I’m after
here. Not that perfectly pleasing, measured harmonic, that synthed
and kindled happy medium. That balance, that stasis; form on its way
toward resolve, that cant.

I think we are up to-out there-eleven dimensions.

~

I do not believe the earth is flat.

But I still believe in the humors. I subscribe to all that good theory, from Hippocrates on down, about the origins and travel patterns
of feeling and disease, trade routes of blood, phlegm, yellow and black
biles wafting or bathing, the charts of consequence for the overflow
of one and the absence of another. I believe in the humors with their
assigned temperaments, dispersed and roaring throughout the body,
each with its province bounded and hued, its climate matched to the
elements residing in spleen, heart, brain, and liver.

Of course, when I’m driving long stretches, I still pull toward the
horizon, numinous line that exists and doesn’t exist.

And of course, when I saw the autopsies performed, the blood
therein was poppy red, red unceasingly, and no misty or frothy, clotted
or blackened and bilious poisons rushed forth.

Two minds certainly complicate one’s mythopoetics.

~

When I read Dickinson and Whitman back-to-back, I am reading
for the precipitous rise and fall between them. If styles are territories,
I want to tack along those raw, open ranges and consider the
America that held them both. I read as if trekking, for the recovery
period in which a musculature repairs between one exertion and
another. I read for the crevice, the gorge that opens between the
vastness on either side. And I read to fall into the gap there, to be the
place where the two shadows go syncretic. Sometimes I get confused:
whose shadow, whose shoulder was that rubbing mine?

I have two shoulders, I know, I know. There’s a voice stationed
at each-her strain, his force; the oracular and choric; whisper and
yawp. And there between them, I tense and hollow out pockets in
my collarbone. I make myself a harrowed place into which each
abundance, each with its differing umbrage, falls, for one is not more
dense than the other, or more weighty, ecstatic, agonal, dire.

The scission that has been made between them, I am not upholding.

~

On my way back from Poland, where I lived for a year-almost
fifteen years ago now-I sat next to an old woman on the plane. She
wore a long skirt with a long-sleeved blouse, and a heavy wig with
a scarf, though it was June. She was the wife of an important rabbi
in New York. They had both survived the Holocaust; when she
reached for her bag overhead, there were the numbers on her arm.
We were talking about famous gardens we both knew in Russia,
England, Poland, and France. I told her I’d never had much luck with
my own gardens, how they were always a mess, everything straying
and overrunning the beds, getting out of hand and defiant, that it
was not at all relaxing. She described the gardens she’d always kept.
She spoke of her roses, zinnias, dahlias, the tangle of vines netting
over, everything crammed in a too-small space. “You know,” she
said in her thick accent, “I love them all. All the weeds and flowers.
I keep even the dandelions in.” I remember thinking I recognize that.
And I remember feeling shaken by the recognition, the neatness and
the wildness unresolved. That she was not, could not be, discerning.
I remember staring into the dirty gray weave of the seat in front of
me. I remember thinking, uneasily, This is the only way anything will
ever make sense to me.

~

I love the friend who is slow to talk, whose composure is a hardwon
grace, who works to find a rent in the persistent heavy folds
and drapes that weeks-indeed whole seasons at a stretch-can be,
and laughs despite.

And I love the one who stands easily close, goes rib to rib, leans
in, eyes closed, and sniffs and says, “We are all such animals, aren’t
we?”

~

Two minds must state their position, as in any good debate, and
fight it out.

I believe in progress and that we get better.

And I believe in a form/countenance/aspect so essential it cannot
be altered. I like the archaic “bearing,” the idea of a temperament
informing, upholding our actions.

“He had two selves within him apparently, and they must learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.
Strange that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our
infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide
plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.”-wrote George
Eliot/Mary Ann Evans.

~

The woman with the long gray braid, who walks her grandchild
to school, ought to cut her hair, I’m thinking this morning. The braid
is too long and limp and wispy and looks more like a baby squirrel's
tail than a gathered plait waiting to be unfolded and let cascade. I
thought “terrible to be old”-the sinking, the shuffle, the loss of
balance and ease of leaping over curbs . . . but what is it, really, I’m
turning away from? The evidence of Time as it rests and elaborates
in the body? Time commandeering. Offshore detonations rising and
rocking the waters. That it’s shameful somehow to be made helpless
by Time, its scouring away of the individual form one worked
so hard, over a lifetime, to constitute. It is the custom of some old
women to wear beige-“bone,” my grandmother called it. Not “tan” or “ecru.” Not “eggshell.” Not “khaki”-right gear for stalking the
land of bones-but bone. As if that were a color along the spectrum.
Or a charm: resemble the thing you will ultimately be and Time will
pass over your house, mistaking you for already gone.

I hated the meekness of that color. Let me never wear “bone,” I’d
think.

I, who sit daily in front of a collection of real bones, three animal
skulls with rough, flat planes, holes for cords and sockets for eyes, all
flesh picked, washed, burned away.

~

I read: “What others might have called the futility of his passion,
made an additional delight for his imagination . . .” (George Eliot).

Well, no.

And yes.

Two of my oldest friends just visited, each briefly, and returned
home, one to England and one to Italy. I miss them now and, in their absence, know that I will never see them enough in this lifetime.

And I also feel held by the atmosphere each so recently scented.
Right there in my kitchen was the gesture of hers I’d forgotten, long,
elegant hand at her flushed neck, restraining just before launching
her point. And there, still, the sharp tooth that shows when he
laughs, and the quick eye that follows the curve of a pear, reddened
in one spot low on its rump. So I go back and forth. Bereft/held,
bereft/held: my heavy, iambic, two-chambered work.

And yes, the eidetic moments help.

~

Here is a favorite sentence from Ethan Frome, a marvel of lightness
and economy: “Once or twice in the past he had been faintly
disquieted by Zenobia’s way of letting things happen without seeming
to remark them, and then, weeks afterward, in a casual phrase,
revealing that she had all along taken her notes and drawn her inferences.” By the time that first comma arrives, the route of the whole
sentence is so clear and inevitable that the sentence’s way of saying,
post-comma-I remember my brief anxiety about this, the first time
I read it-had better be up to the shape that exists to hold it, that has
already been cast out ahead. Of course, the sentence is up to the task.
It’s a clean, spare sentence. It’s a hinge in the story, too; events turn
because of this sentence, loitering intentions ripen, recrudesce at just
this syntactical moment. I love this sentence because it points out
that a way in which I want to know-as a terrible drive with its end
enfolded-will, in fact, be dramatized in a much larger field in the
story. And though I may be engaged in, as Keats advised against, an
“irritable reaching after fact and reason,” it's more like a game, reading
this sentence. I see the arm cocked and the point let fly. I get a
little blinded by sun and step back. I agitate from foot to foot-then
catch it like an ampoule of dye, or poison, or perfume tossed from
a speeding sled.

Then, too, there is this sentence from Swann's Way:

She was genuinely fond of us; she would have enjoyed the long luxury
of weeping for our untimely decease; coming at a moment when she
felt “well” and was not in a perspiration, the news that the house was being destroyed by a fire, in which all the rest of us had already perished,
a fire which, in a little while, would not leave one stone standing upon
another, but from which she herself would still have plenty of time to
escape without undue haste, provided that she rose at once from her
bed, must often have haunted her dreams, as a prospect which combined
with the two minor advantages of letting her taste the full savour of
her affection for us in long years of mourning, and of causing universal
stupefaction in the village when she should sally forth to conduct our
obsequies, crushed but courageous, moribund but erect, the paramount
and priceless boon of forcing her at the right moment, with no time to
be lost, no room for weakening hesitations, to go off and spend the summer
at her charming farm of Mirougrain, where there was a waterfall.

Waterfall! The mossy relief after the sentence’s journey, much switching
of carriages, all the ungraded roads and travel-dust clouds-
washed away instantly! Such a moment is impervious to irritable
reaching: it deflects and deflects it. While I read faster and faster,
“waterfall,” in its solidity and inexplicable arrival, punches back. Here
is a sentence that withstands me. To which I submit. That perhaps
did not know its own end when it started, as I cannot know its end
when I begin reading. And I am wholly delighted by the resistance
and jittery plunge that follows. By the mirror the sentence becomes,
in which I see my own surprise.

I love the line cast cleanly out, the simple lead weight bringing it
down in the spot planned for.

And I love the veering, careening ride, the ramble and torque and
purifying shock of landing hard.

~

Freud tells the story of taking a summer walk in the country with
a “taciturn friend” and a “young but already famous poet.” They are
ambling along, it’s August 1913, so imagine the overall heaviness of
the slow summer air.

The poet admired the beauty of the scene around us but felt no joy
in it. He was disturbed by the thought that all this beauty was fated
to extinction, that it would vanish when winter came, like all human
beauty and all the beauty and splendour that men have created or may
create. All that he would otherwise have loved and admired seemed to him to be shorn of its worth by the transience which was its doom.

But Freud disputes “the pessimistic poet’s view that the transience
of what is beautiful involves any loss in its worth.” Then he
tries to figure out how mourning works-since that must be what
the two are experiencing, each in his own way, he believes-mourning
for impending death, brevity, fragility. Mourning comes to its
own “spontaneous end,” he reasons. Mourning “consume[s] itself,” he says, and leaves us freshened and ready to attach our love to new
objects.

I think Freud must have seen many beautiful nests-with-eggs
on that walk to come up with this idea about the spontaneous end
of mourning. Is there anything more snugly held, more promising
a sign of spring, than a surprise cluster of eggs in a nest? I imagine
they would have been robins’ eggs, blue of the favorite book of my
fourth year, Little Bear’s Mother, where I first encountered the color
in any meaningful way (as backlit morning playground, then dusky
sky, then shadow of the mother over the little bear) and was held
by it, felt some thirst commence, and drank and drank, and felt, at
that stream, the never-enough, never, never, never-enough of pleasure
held only briefly still (then gone, but so refreshed upon reading-
again! Please, again! ). Freud saw-must have seen-a nest and
constituted therein his response, which was a kind of rivulet of blue
between his friends’ adamant darks. He must have held his mourning
in his own warm hand-after all, it was 1915 when he wrote of
this walk, the war was on-until out came an orange-breasted flame
from the blue.

(Often I prefer mourning/anger/rebellion in the face of my own
various losses. But too, I have my blue robins’ eggs, and looking at
them makes me content. These I collected, souvenirs of a sort, over
the past year on the walks I took, sometimes three a day, to quell the
factions, to run the warring out of my body.)

~

Recently I was walking to the park and, as I dropped the letter
I was carrying into the mailbox, I was stilled by the notion, almost a
prediction, that I would find a reindeer, a really tiny one, the size of, say, a lemon. This is the way the image came to me: it “popped in” (maybe fell? down from some nest?). Maybe the weather, a very cool
June afternoon, encouraged the image's weird arrival. I attempted to
exchange the reindeer for something more seasonal, more discernibly
trinkety and likely to surface (clover, penny, bottle cap), but the
reindeer was stubborn. It was meaning to be found.

I suppose I might dig around a bit, psyche-wise, and find the
reindeer representing/standing in for something delicate and hidden,
meaningful in some way I cannot yet understand.

Along the way there were white tulips so robust they reached to
my waist. I saw some kind of evergreen whose uppermost branch
shot out, like a hooked cane, into clear sky. Pink azaleas were dulling
to brown and looked more like colonies of coral. And the place the
reindeer sprang from, that swampy, rampant, tundral field, offered this
image, too: a cleanly flensed frog. Now the two images were overlapping,
the frog’s empurpled and milky-blue, skinned legs-and the
whole and intact tiny-frog-sized reindeer.

Then came the smell of gingerbread, though maybe I’m misidentifying
some flower’s perfume, and while this whole sensation/
eidolon/charm wasn’t about winter at all, many wintry things kept
adding up.

To what, though? To what?

I am of two minds about knowing.

What if I thought about the images differently: simply, that they
exist. Are out there embedded in shifting forms, and enter me, the
moment’s site of odd happenings. No irritable reaching, just Hello,
Reindeer. Hello, Frog. Your absolute smallness. Your unexplained
blues. All fact and reason just let go of.

These images are meaningful/I have no idea what these images
mean. And what do I get if I push these very real-but-odd pictures
up against the nothing-in-hand?

Not a stand-in bird.

Maybe a glimpse of the blue flame of an egg.

~

Shakespeare’s Sonnet 13 is either to a person called “Love,” or it’s
an apostrophe to Love-the-Idea. There’s a pleasing wobble, a close
up then zoomed-out, back-and-forth shimmy between the options
as you read. You have to go at it like a swimmer, face in and out
(breathe!) of the water.

Love is a palpable, real, other’s body you can touch and smell
and talk to.

Or if the Beloved goes away, and there’s carelessness to hachure
in, and the issue of dumb youth/dumb age overtakes, you’re suddenly
overhearing someone reasoning, wrangling with an unruly
idea.

(Reading this sonnet is good practice for the even more dizzying
Sonnets 135 and 136, where “will” has no fewer than three meanings
embraided: poet/drive/intention to act.)

~

That old man kneeling in the woods, come upon as I was walking,
crouched low at a fallen tree, hands pressed together-was he
okay, resting like any pilgrim might, his scant belongings bundled,
eyes closed and face tilted up? I looked back to be sure he was praying
and hadn’t just fallen, and to see if I should help. It seemed like a
loss he was speaking to, for he had picked the right props-downed
tree, rough cane, small parcel-and added to them only himself, a
beseeching presence.

But maybe he had fallen. As in “from grace.” (Sometimes, against
one’s will, a oneness of meaning creeps in.)

~

This summer, of all I’ve read and copied out, because I wanted
to keep the words close and to feel them come from my own hand,
here’s this little passage from Proust: “To reach the end of a day,
natures that are slightly nervous, as mine was, make use, like motorcars,
of different ‘speeds.’ There are mountainous, uncomfortable
days, up which one takes an infinite time to pass, and days downward
sloping, through which one can go at full tilt, singing as one goes.”

That's me in my motorcar dress, windows open, hair flying.

Sometimes I am grateful he knows. (And that he knew me
before I was born! And that the words awaited me all these years!)

Sometimes I feel stripped bare and found out.

~

Given the choice between, say, a dozen decent chocolates and
one small piece of pure Belgian dark, I’ll take the smaller, perfect
thing. The brief, onetime delicacy. It has always been this way with
me. I’ll eat it at once, no slow rationing-out, and then live with the
fleet abundance and longing.

But, too, I have these perfect T-shirts, so well fitting, falling just
so-a whole drawerful I took such care in collecting-that I resist
putting them on for fear of wearing them out and then not-having.

~

I'm drawn to the way rust bleeds out around a razor in the rain.

And I want to pick the razor up so no kid will get hurt.

I want the stain to spread.

And I want no one to run in a mess to the doctor (for I myself,
surprise nail-in-the-foot, once had the awful emergency shots).

I want this perfect lost-barn tint contained in the blade’s corona
every time I cross the street right here.

And just for fun? One of the T-shirts I love too well is the color
of that rust, precisely.

~

One letter, handwritten (unsealed, the flap just tucked in) to
a Mrs. G. from Jehovah’s Witness Mary D., suggesting another visit
and scripture reading (quick, fifteen minutes, she assures) to ease
Mrs. G.’s hurt over the loss of her brother. The letter is beautiful,
and ends, “I just wanted you to know that I am still out and will
be happy to see you whenever you can make the time-and that's usually
what we have to do-make time because it seem time just don’t allow.
Most Sincerely.” I am drawn to the handwriting, a combination of
script and print, carefully laid across plain, unlined paper and
comfortably sloping, the ease of language, the unself-conscious
voice set down so directly on the page, an unmediated mind-to-paper
move certain of its task. I wish the letter would go on, for I do
not want to leave this voice.

But at home, I hide when the Witnesses come. I want to be left
alone in my godless world. I want not to be exhorted or cajoled
or handed one thing more for my own good. I am fed best by what
is left behind. Detritus, loved and held. (No pure dark Belgian
here.) I’d do well as a crow or a vulture, cleaning, paring, finding
succulent what has been overlooked and is moldering.

The “good word,” okay.

But not to have to receive it fresh and from on high.

~

Today it rained hard for much of the afternoon. It got dark fast,
let go a hard, final downpour, and now the streets are clear and
sharp-smelling. The light, these long last days of summer, is low
enough to jewel and yellow, blur, and now, if I tilt my head, rainbow
all the drops hanging from the phone line. The colors weight the
drops, slick them with fire and sea greens in shifts.

I read, for sustenance, more sustenance than my own lemonbeaded
raindrops on the high wire can give, Proust on asparagus:

tinged with ultramarine and rosy pink which ran from their heads, finely
stippled in mauve and azure, through a series of imperceptible changes
to their white feet, still stained a little by the soil of their garden-bed: a
rainbow-loveliness that was not of this world. I felt that these celestial
hues indicated the presence of exquisite creatures who had been pleased
to assume vegetable form, who, through the disguise which covered
their firm and edible flesh, allowed me to discern in this radiance of
earliest dawn, these hinted rainbows, these blue evening shades . . .

I walk through this rain thinking at one time I would point this
all out to you, hold these drops somehow against that astral asparagus,
iridesce the water, roll a pearly drop toward you, fray and sift
asparagal light. But now you live in another city, and you, in another
country, or you (who have not yet even made an appearance here)
and I no longer speak of such things.

But I want the shine to live. And before I know it, I am offering,
tilting into the light and bringing forth . . . something: fine beads aloft, an abacus of pearls, say. I’m sowing some new green, but it’s for
you, Reader, whom I both know and do not know, who both exist
and do not exist, who constitute an elsewhere far, further than I can
imagine, years, maybe centuries away.

Whose elsewhere is a balm and a comfort.

Lia Purpura’s new collection of essays, On
Looking, has just been published by Sarabande Press. She is
writer-in-residence at Loyola College and will be Bedell Visiting
Writer at the University of Iowa in spring 2007. Her essay “Glaciology”
appeared in AGNI 60.
(10/2006)